The Visible Bridge or What Was Nixon's Favorite TV Show?

In the spirit of Rick Perlstein's The Invisible Bridge (which I'm totally asking my mom to get me for my birthday!), let's look at the transition from Nixon to Reagan on Family Ties, shall we? In season one, Steven's conservative father visits and when the subject of Nixon comes up during dinner, he says, "Nixon was framed, you know." Steven tries to calm down by excusing himself, but from the next room he yells, "HE WAS NOT FRAMED! HE WAS A CROOK!"

Alex also had a House Un-American Activities coloring book.

The scene is played for laughs - Steven returns to the table and mildly asks someone to please pass the potatoes - but the indictment is not itself the joke. That episode aired on November 3, 1982, only eight years after Nixon's resignation, and in the early seasons of the show the serious lessons of Watergate share space with the humorous adoration Alex feels. Nixon is the political Rorschach test and sun; Reagan is practically a distant star. 

By season four, while the show hasn't abandoned its references to Nixon, they've increasingly become linked to objects, relics of Alex's childhood that serve as signifiers of his precociousness and early political affiliations. There's his Nixon lunchbox, his Nixon rattle. Reagan isn't totally immune from such treatment; Alex uses a framed photo of the president as an educational tool for his infant brother Andrew:

"74 years old, he still has his own teeth. I mean, this is everything you'd want in a president."

(This world-leaders-education-for-babies joke would be used to great effect two years later in the film Baby Boom. In that movie, the babies get actual flashcards!)

But beyond such visual gags, by increasingly focusing on Alex and making him mostly likable, the show served to make Reagan more palatable, too. Alex liked Reagan; therefore we could, too.

Yet while this conflation of character and president was occurring, the show nevertheless had an "ambivalent relationship with the value system of the Reagan era," as  Bambi L. Haggins notes in her essay "There's No Place Like Home: The American Dream, African-American Identity, and the Situation Comedy." Haggins also argues that Family Ties exhibited "self-conscious parodying" of these values.

You can see some of that parody in this season four dialogue between Alex and Steven. Alex is watching CNN footage from a Reagan press conference:

Alex:  He was just talking about this new Star Wars defense system, Dad. It is great. We're going to build these, these space weapons that can shoot down Soviet
missiles. Now, if the Soviets build space weapons that can shoot down our missiles,
we're gonna build bigger space weapons to shoot down their space weapons. And
if they build bigger space weapons to shoot down our space weapons, we'll build
even bigger space weapons to shoot down their space weapons that shoot down
our space weapons.

Steven: Finally, something sensible is happening.

   

"Well, uh, either you got that bank job or Richard Nixon has re-entered politics."

Dialogue like this troubles the simple picture of the show delivering a sunny, good-looking White House proxy and makes it seem kind of incredible that Reagan called Family Ties his favorite TV show - did he actually watch it? Or was he just aware that it had an avowedly Republican character who was played by that actor who was in that cool time travel movie that also mentioned him?

It's also easy, re-watching this show, to forget that Nixon was still alive when it aired, that as much as Nixon the Character haunts and guides the lives of the show's characters as a figure from the past, a real man sat at home…probably not watching this show.